Keep on Dreaming
by androidilenya
Summary: A one-shot set during the Battle of Wolf 359, TNG episode 'The Best of Both Worlds', with flashbacks to earlier times, told from Picard/Locutus's perspective. Rated K-plus for lots of exploding starships. Complete.


**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Based on the Star Trek: Next Generation episodes 'The Best of Both Worlds Part One' and 'The Best of Both Worlds Part Two'.**

* * *

_~... some dreams stay with you forever, drag you round and bring you back to where you were. Some dreams keep on getting better, gotta keep believing if you want to know for sure... keep on dreaming even if it breaks your heart... don't let it break your heart.~_

_-Eli Young Band_

* * *

**Stardate 44002.3**

In a Federation-controlled, well-explored, and completely non-descript area of space known as Wolf 359, a group of forty Starfleet ships were fighting valiantly against an implacable foe- and losing very badly.

An explosion, soundless in the vacuum of space, lit up the dull surface of the cube, blossoming red and orange, as a starship was blown apart. The resultant shockwave knocked a few of its comrades back, but their opponent was not at all shaken.

Their opponent... a huge, dark grey cube, inexorably moving forward, smashing the starships facing it as a child might crush so many ants on a sidewalk. Its surface was a twisted, dizzying array of seemingly random conduits and warped metal, unlike anything in the ships it was currently fighting. Bright streaks of light flashed as its weapons slammed into its adversaries, over and over, unstoppable and relentless.

Truly, resistance was futile.

Aboard one of the doomed starships, a captain struggled to keep her ship intact and crew mostly alive and unassimilated. Though one could never have told it from the Vulcan's emotionless face, Captain Tarika of the U.S.S. Princeton was experiencing something she had rarely, if ever, felt in her life. Fear. Then again, any captain in her position had a right to a bit of alarm- she was not only faced with the possibility of her own death, but that of her whole crew and possibly Earth as well.

"Shields at thirty-two percent and falling," her security chief called from the tactical station in the back, panic clear in his voice. The ship shuddered as another energy burst from the cube hit them, the lights briefly flickering as the bridge officers grabbed for the nearest stable object in an effort to stay upright.

"Helm, execute maneuver omega-three-delta," her first officer, Commander Julian Hawke, ordered.

Tarika turned her attention back to the monstrous cube that filled the viewscreen. Starfleet's attack pattern was clearly not working- at least ten starships had been destroyed already, the floating debris provided an unnecessary additional hazard to the surviving ships. She clenched her hands around the armrests of the captain's chair, trying to forget the words uttered to her and every other starship that had gathered here to combat this, the Federation's newest and potentially most deadly threat.

_Resistance is futile. Disarm your weapons and escort us to sector 001. If you attempt to intervene, we will destroy you._

And then the words broadcast to all of Starfleet, from the Enterprise's first real encounter of this horror.

_We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile._

But not even that terribly final declaration had been enough to strike fear in her well-trained heart. It was the speaker. A man highly respected in Starfleet, one whose maneuvers were in Academy textbooks. But it was no longer that celebrated captain which spoke, though the creature had his face, his body.

_Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body._ Not a saying of Vulcan origin, true, but in Tarika's opinion it applied here as well as anything else. The Borg could take away one's humanity, rob them of free will, and make them nothing more than a tool. To her, that was more terrifying than any weapon that could be leveled against the Federation.

The voice of her chief engineer burst in over the com, and her sensitive picked up his voice even above the various alarms blaring through the smoke-filled air. _"Antimatter containment fields collapsing, captain!"_

"Of course," Julian muttered. "We get hit by a few phaser blasts, and boom! Antimatter containment fields are gone. You'd think that Starfleet would've fixed that glitch by now. Really. What _are_ those admirals doing back there?"

A few titters came from the rest of the bridge crew, who seemed slightly comforted by the commander's gallows humor. Tarika took a deep breath and addressed the engineer, raising her head slightly. "How much longer?"

_"Two minutes, max."_

Tarika nodded. "Acknowledged, commander. Bridge out." She turned to her terrified helmsman, a young Andorian shen. "Ensign, lay in an intercept course with the cube and prepare to engage on my mark."

"Y-yes, sir."

She looked around the bridge. Had she been a more emotional being, she might have felt no small amount of pride at the sight of the determined faces of her officers. It was a tribute to their Starfleet training that not one of them voiced an objection to her order. "Are you all ready?"

Everyone nodded solemnly.

"It has been an honor to serve with you, sir," Julian said, tears glistening in his dark eyes.

Tarika nodded in acknowledgment, then turned to the helmsman. "Engage."

Her ship, wounded though it was, hull battered and broken, turned towards the cube. It lurched forwards, and on the bridge the latticed metal surface filled the viewscreen until nothing else could be seen.

Tarika's last thought was one of defiance.

_Resistance is never futile._

~o0o~

Aboard the cube, the creature that had once been Jean-Luc Picard watched as the ship crashed into it, imploding in a deadly explosion. Deadly for those aboard it, that is. The sacrifice of hundreds of Starfleet officers did not in any way affect the cube itself.

Somewhere inside the Borg drone, what remained of the human screamed in protest and fury as those aboard the ship died, anguish filling him as he struggled in vain against the iron bonds of the Collective.

The drone felt nothing. Locutus watched coldly as the ship was blasted into nonexistence, becoming nothing more than additional debris on the field of what was rapidly becoming a massacre.

_No... please... _please...

Locutus dismissed this plea as irrelevant.

Powerless, helpless, Picard watched through Locutus's eyes as another ship was blown to pieces, as the Borg cube continued on its course toward Sector 001. Toward Earth.

_Why can't I stop this?_ Picard raged, trapped in his own body, unable to do anything but watch as Locutus decimated the remains of the fleet that Starfleet had sent to protect the homeworld. _Why? Stop this... someone... anyone. Help... me..._

He couldn't even close his eyes to block out the scenes of carnage unfolding before him, And even had he been able to do so, he would have forced himself to watch, to watch and remember, because he was responsible for every one of these deaths. He had failed them. He had failed Starfleet. He had failed humanity.

He had failed himself.

~o0o~

~_"Jean-Luc? Jean-Luc!"_

_The little boy ignored his mother's calls, knowing from experience that her summons would fade soon and he would be left alone, free to stay outside until the falling darkness forced him home, back to the warmth and light._

_He set off down the path, running his hands through the grapevine leaves, reveling in the way they brushed, silk-like, against his fingers. These vines were the pride and joy of his father, and his father's father, and so on and so forth, back down generations of proud Frenchmen._

_But Jean-Luc Picard had different dreams._

_He looked up at the darkening sky, slowly sitting down at the foot of one of the trees lining the path. He leaned his head back against the rough bark and watched as, overhead, first and then another star came out, white pinpricks against a deep, purple-black sky._

_Tens of thousands of years ago, man's ancestors sat around fires, hemmed in by the darkness and dangers of the night, stalked by equal parts fear and wild animals. Even then some looked up, past the wavering light and thick smoke of their primitive fires, to the white-hot blazing night sky above. And they wondered, and they felt a pull to push further, seek new frontiers and explore._

_And on the grounds of a stately French chateau, in the middle of the twenty-fourth century, a young boy looked up at a different sky, different constellations, and felt the same pull. The same desire to explore the unknown that had forced humanity away from home, into the wilderness, for generations._

_Rigel... Alpha Centuri... Sirius B... Betelgeuse... the strange Latin and Greek names filled the boy's head as he stared wide-eyed at the sky, drinking in the glory, feeling a wordless ache in his heart._

I'm going there someday, _he promised himself. _All of them.

~o0o~

_"There you are."_

_The boy's only response was a soft snore. With a rueful chuckle, the man bent down and picked him up, lifting the tiny child with hardly any effort. He set off back down the path, careful to avoid jostling his sleeping son._

_"You're quite the dreamer, eh, Jean-Luc?" he murmured softly, as he eased the back door open._

_The blonde woman sitting in an armchair looked up. "Where was he?"_

_"Where he always is. Down at the end of the vineyard, by that old tree." The man sighed, gently setting the boy down on the couch and draping a blanket over him. He knelt and untied the boy's shoes, carefully setting to the side, then standing and stretching._

_His wife watched these tender ministrations with a small smile on his face. "He'll be great one day."_

_"But not here."_

_The sadness and bitterness in his voice made her frown. "He's got a dream, darling. Who are we to take that away?"_

_"But... the vineyard..."_

_"Will be taken care of quite well by his brother," she interrupted smoothly. "Jean-Luc has the dream. You know that. He'll never stop until he fulfills it." _

_She leaned down, brushing a lock of dark brown hair out of his face. "Sleep well, _mon bébé_," she murmured, bending down and brushing her lips against the sleeping boy's forehead._

_The boy slept, and as he slept, he dreamed..._

~o0o~

The Borg drone Locutus also dismissed this as irrelevant. Dreams were irrelevant. Resistance was futile. The Collective was all that mattered. Soon this upstart race known as 'humanity' would be assimilated and cataloged, and the rest of the galaxy- maybe even more- would follow.

Another ship destroyed itself in a pointless burst of light.

_You will be assimilated_.

Locutus turned away from the viewscreen to face the newly assimilated drones behind him, optical implants and prosthetic limbs glinting dully in the green-tinted light. Like him, they were former humans, former Starfleet officers. Like him, they had had their humanity forcibly ripped from them, despite their protests, despite their resistance.

_Resistance is futile._

~o0o~

_One second he had been standing on the bridge of his starship, staring at the Borg cube on the screen, and the next he had felt the arms of a drone encircle him. Then the bridge had dissolved around him as the cube's transporter took him. _

_Even then he had not recognized the full horror of his situation. He was prepared to be held hostage, prepared to be tortured, even prepared to be killed._

_He was not, however, prepared to be assimilated._

_First there was the cold, sharp bite of the needle-thin assimilation tubules, piercing the skin of his neck. An icy sensation spread through his veins and he struggled against his captor's arms, only to discover that he no longer had control over his body. Panic flooded his mind, prompting him to try to scream, to cry out, do anything... but the Collective already had a firm grasp on him._

_Then the soulless voice of their Queen echoed in his mind. _Surrender to the Collective... and become Locutus of Borg. You will be our intermediary to your... Federation_._

I will never surrender_, he raged silently, still attempting to free himself from her malevolent grasp._

Oh, Locutus_, the queen replied, sounding almost amused._ Don't you know it by now? Resistance is futile.

_As she said this, Picard was dragged to the operating table. Supine on the cold surface, he stared unblinkingly up into the heart of the Borg cube, into a dizzying expanse of metal catwalks and sickly green light. A tear of frustration and hopelessness spilled over his cheek, running down to his ear. The merciless embrace of the Collective enveloped him, relentlessly erasing every speck of his individuality._

_He was no longer Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Federation starship _Enterprise_._

_He was Locutus._

~o0o~

And still, now, he was Locutus, lording over the slaughter of those who had been his comrades-in-arms, those he had vowed o serve and protect and never betray. The human part of him had been relegated to some dark corner of his mind, the only remnant of his past life the body now enveloped in cold mechanical trappings.

His past...

Images of the people he had known flashed through his head- William Riker, the best first officer a captain could ask for- Data, the android who wished to be human- Worf, the warrior, full of honor- Beverly Crusher, the woman he had always secretly loved, though he had never had the courage to tell her.

He would never be able to, now.

Their faces slipped out of his mind like sand running through his fingers, slowly dispersing into the dark void that was Locutus. They were followed by his hope, his ambitions... his dreams. The dream that propelled him to seek the stars, to join Starfleet in search of fulfillment of his desire to seek out strange new worlds, new life, new civilizations... it was gone.

All that was left was the Collective.

* * *

**Apologies for the ending, but it isn't like we don't know how 'The Best of Both Worlds' ended, right? **

**Review please.**


End file.
